Job report expected to cap ugly stats

An avalanche of recent economic indicators has stirred fears that a lumbering recovery could soon devolve even more dramatically, putting a spotlight on the government jobs report being released Friday morning.

But several economists expect the July employment figures will show a nation coping with feeble growth, rather than one teetering back into recession.

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“To us, it looks to be another number consistent with the slow growth that we’ve been experiencing this year,” said John Ryding, chief economist at RDQ Economics. “It leaves us some ways away from a ‘recession’ by the economist’s definition of a recession.”

The National Bureau of Economic Research—-which officially decides when a downturn begins—-judges a recession based on several months of decline as observed in gross domestic product, real income, employment, industrial production and retail sales.

Karen Dynan, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution who previously served as a Federal Reserve senior adviser, said it would take some traumatic incidents to push the country back into a painful slump.

“We would have to see pretty unusual events, such as a panic in financial markets,” she said.

Still, some economic luminaries are sounding the alarm based on harsh realities about housing, personal spending and an economy that barely eked out any uptick in the first half of the year.

The Friday number caps weeks of brutal economic reports. So far this week, the Commerce Department said that consumer spending dropped in June, while other reports showed declines in the manufacturing and service sectors. Revised GDP estimates came out last week that had economic growth for the first six months of the year at less than 1 percent. And last month’s employment report found that a mere 18,000 jobs were created in June, a number several factors below market expectations.